Sunday, 13 May 2012

Sunday, I am eating agrapefruit, church is over at the Russian Orthodox to thewest.

she is darkof Eastern descent,large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down. a small red and blackBible, and as she readsher legs keep moving, moving,she is doing a slow rhythmic dancereading the Bible...

long gold earrings;2 gold bracelets on each arm,and it's a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,the lightest of tans is that cloth,she twists this way and that,long yellow legs warm in the sun...

there is no escaping her beingthere is no desire to...

my radio is playing symphonic music
that she cannot hearbut her movements coincide exactlyto the rhythms of thesymphony...

Tom,It is maybe only coincidental that i saw an odd eyed cat a week ago who regularly shows up at my grandmother's kitchen door..The turkish are fond of them...As according to them "the eyes must be as green as the lake and as blue as the sky"...As for charles' immortalization of the fact that very little passes between the hands that clap and those who rather point a finger or two at one other or oneself might just salvage something...i agree

Manik, I think you've homed in on what's so interesting about this poem. Hands imagined as clapping in rhythm or hands imagined as clasped in prayer, eyes looking up to the sky above the Orthodox church or eyes captured by the swaying dancer reading the Bible... but a few of the many varieties of religious experience?

Hazen,

Well, the soppy marketing aspects notwithstanding, something (diabolical?) hinted that Mother might not mind a shot to spice up her Day.

Possibly even a double.

Nin,

One of the cats here does that to Angelica when he wants her to wake up. Another of them expresses the same desire by yodeling. A third has the nocturnal mission of vigorously sucking on my earlobes. Weird, but certainly gets one's attention. However I expect the purpose of this curious behaviour is not to awaken, but to reawaken... memories of a mother removed too soon?

Cats dreaming, one can hear their small vocalizations. A. thinks they are dreaming about tracking down little animals.

Kent,

You know you are my main man. Even on a day when the local sandlot gang was being totally verlander'd.

Wonderful poem. I agree with A. -- they are dreaming about tracking down little animals. One of our cats -- a cream-colored Persian named Claude -- artfully distributes papers he finds on my desk most nights in amazing patterns across the floor and sometimes up and down the stairs. During the act of creation, his vocalizations are varied, piercing and a little disturbing. When his work is completed he is silent and returns to bed. He should, as they say, be in a museum. (Or, rather, his work should.) Our dog Edie has two different colored eyes. Curtis

I wake up on Mother's Daywith tears in my eyesfor my dead fatherand a song in my earsit's my daughter singing"Take Me Out To The Ballgame"

Berkson's back cover pic: for years my vision of heaven on earth. Hear my grandson Finn now sing that song at Comerica, his sister's t-ball games, and for his mother and her mother on this day the dream alive.